Learning with Gertrude Stein: Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace

The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.

—Gertrude Stein, "What Are Masterpieces and
Why Are There so Few of Them"

Surprises

We are Jim Peck and Kelly Howe, an assistant professor and a senior at Muhlenberg College, a small, private liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania with a flourishing theatre program. In the spring of 2002, we and the sixteen other students in THR 380 Special Topics: Meyerhold, Brecht, and Stein spent a semester investigating the theatres of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, and Gertrude Stein. Throughout the semester, we worked to combine theory and practice; we read and discussed key texts, and the students made many theatre pieces using the ideas of these modernist luminaries. The theatre pieces took two forms: short, quickly rehearsed theatrical compositions designed to help students embody theoretical concepts, and more lengthily rehearsed scenes from pertinent plays (Mayakovsky's The Bedbug; Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Stein's Identity). Every student wrote three short papers (one on each figure) and a longer, research-oriented paper on a topic of his or her choice. We studied each artist for a third of the semester (approximately five weeks), beginning with Meyerhold, continuing with Brecht, and concluding with Stein. For each unit, students worked in a collaborative group of five or six; when we moved on to a new artist, students got a new set of collaborators. Jim assigned a "director" for each working group, though in practice the projects resulted largely from processes of collective creation. Everyone acted frequently and functioned as "director" once.

This essay focuses on the work created by students in the final third of the semester in response to the ideas, practices, and texts of Gertrude Stein. Our study of each artist was fruitful; students and professor learned a great deal about the ideas and practices of these people, and students created much smart, exciting theatre. That said, the work with Stein compels our attention here because it also raised thorny, interesting pedagogical questions. We have come to believe that Stein's artistic practice contains an incipient pedagogy that both challenges traditional models of knowledge and offers potentially transformative methods of teaching and learning. We aim to contribute to an emerging intersection between pedagogy and performance studies perhaps best exemplified by the essays in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer's recent anthology, Teaching Performance Studies. We're especially interested in embodiment and affect in the classroom. "I think we can agree," writes Elyse Lamm Pineau in "Critical Performative Pedagogy: Fleshing out the Politics of Liberatory Education," "that bodies in the classroom are overwhelmingly inscribed as absence. Steeped in the tradition of Cartesian dualism, students and teachers effectively have been schooled to "forget" their bodies when they enter the classroom in order that they might give themselves more fully to the life of the mind" (45). Something similar might be said of emotions; so often, the traditional academy positions feelings as obstacles to thought, impediments to rational analysis and sound judgment. Working with Stein unhinges these prevalent binary oppositions in generative ways. Stein poses bodies and feelings as pathways to thought—as entrees to the most profound insights into self, other, and the relationship between them. Accordingly, she potentially prompts learning of the most consequential sort—intellectual, emotional, and ethical. We want to trace the trajectory of this learning in one class and extrapolate some possible implications of Stein's theatrical theory for pedagogy generally.

Our unit on Stein began with Jim offering a synopsis of Stein's dramaturgy. Though not particularly well-known as a dramatist, Stein wrote over seventy plays and...